She was arrested and charged for possession and discharge of a weapon on school property too

A teenage girl from Florida has been expelled from her high school for an accidental explosion caused by mixing chemicals together [outside] on school grounds.

Kiera Wilmot, 16, a Bartow High School student in Florida, was expelled from school when her chemistry experiment exploded. She was mixing some household chemicals (toilet cleaner and aluminum foil) in an 8-ounce water bottle when the top popped off unexpectedly and an explosion occurred.

According to Wilmot, she thought this combination would simply create a bit of smoke, and that the explosion was an accident.

However, Wilmot was arrested on Monday and charged with possession and discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device.

Kiera Wilmot

She was also expelled from school, and will now have to continue her high school career in an expulsion program.

These extreme consequences are due to zero-tolerance programs, which were enacted in schools in 1994. At that time, Congress required states to adopt laws that expelled students who brought firearms to school for at least a year. All 50 states adopted the laws in order to receive federal funding.

Many are in opposition of these laws, saying that it isn't fair to good kids who make occasional mistakes. Many oppose what happened to Wilmot as well, but the school district has responded to the incident saying that they reacted properly, as the law requires.

"Unfortunately, what she did falls into our code of conduct," Leah Lauderdale, a spokeswoman for the district, tells Riptide. "It's grounds for immediate expulsion.

"We urge our parents to convey to their kids that there are consequences to their actions."

Actually it is a bomb, its called a pop bottle bomb, and obviously you didn't make very many if you did. You use a 600ml bottle not a big one...builds the pressure faster. If someone was holding onto the bottle when it went off or had it near their head...wow not fun with a lot of blood. This is of course before you even start to add other ingredients like gasoline which work just fine if you provide an ignition source.Did the authorities over react? Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a dumb ass thing to do.

Plax bottles work the best IMO. The locking safety caps hold on incredibly well, and the bottle itself is a thick, sturdy plastic. The bottle will actually deform into a cylinder and nearly double in length before it finally tears.

Definitely this was a dumb thing for her to do. They are definitely dangerous, not just because of the explosion itself, but also the hot caustic fluid which gets sprayed in all directions.